*UPDATE: THE FIRST SET OF DATA WAS RELEASED BY THE COALITION FOR NEXT GENERATION LIFE SCIENCE ON FEB 1, 2018. SEE MORE BELOW*

Infographic on trends on career trajectories in the U.S. in biology, by Jessica Polka in this ASCB post

Where do PhDs and Postdocs Go?

For potential graduate students and postdoctoral researchers to make informed decisions about their science and their careers, they need to have all the facts at their disposal. One metric that is needed is data on the career outcomes of previous graduate students and postdoctoral researchers at programs and institutions. There have been calls for decades for this data to be made available, but while data on undergraduate, law school and medical school alumnae have been available for some time at many institutions, the research enterprise has dragged its feet in getting such metrics available for academe.

However, there seems to be a turning point under way, in the gathering pace of those looking to share outcomes. Rescuing Biomedical Research recently convened a consortium of stakeholders to discuss Improving transparency in Ph.D. Career Outcomes. While the discussion has focused mainly on graduate students, groups such as the Coalition for Next Generation Life Science are also committed to releasing postdoc data. While this all has a very biomedical flavor to it, there is hope that these principles are easily applied to all fields.

The first data release from the Coalition for Next Generation Life Science from Feb 1 2018 can be found here and includes:

Admissions and matriculation data of Ph.D. students

Median time to degree and completion data for Ph.D. programs

Demographics of Ph.D. students and postdoctoral scholars by gender, underrepresented minority status, and citizenship

This resource page seeks to combine all of this information together, along with resources on the discussion about career outcomes data. Below you will find resources listed by institution – if your institution isn’t there and you know of data, please contact info@futureofresearch to let us know, and we’ll gladly add the information in here.

(For Life Sciences programs) Is this institution planning on joining the Next Generation Life Science coalition, pledging to make PhD student career outcome data publicly available? nglscoalition.org, CNGLS@JHU.EDU

Joshua Hall at UNC Chapel Hill is also keeping a list of programs dropping the requirement for the Graduate Research exam or GRE – you can see that list here.

*Section 403C of the NIH Health Reform Act of 2006 (P.L.109-482) requires that institutions receiving NIH-funded training grants report these statistics to their graduate program applicants. Please email info@futureofresearch.org if an institution you are contacting is not co-operative.

U.S. Institutional Career Outcomes Data

This list is not exhaustive and will be updated as we receive information – please contact info@futureofresearch.org with any updates or comments.

Schools vary by data presented/standard of data presentation. Note some schools report across all fields, whereas some only report for biomedical fields.

Members of the Coalition for Next Generation Life Science (CNGLS) are marked with

Statements and Resources

CNGLS

The Coalition for Next Generation Life Sciences website is here. We issued a statement on the Next Generation Life Sciences Coalition here and we will issue regular updates as data is released by the coalition. Their paper on the rationale behind the coalition, “A new data effort to inform career choices in biomedicine” was published in Science in December 2017.

RBR

The effort spearheaded by Rescuing Biomedical Research, “Improving transparency in Ph.D. career outcomes” describes outcomes of a meeting of stakeholders, examples of the kind of data that individual institutions could collect, and how aggregate data could be presented. There is also a thorough discussion of taxonomies to be used in presenting career outcomes information.